orentation and interface design question

Hello all! I've developing a next-genish iOS rhythm game for the past 3 years all on my own! Almost ready to launch
First I just want to say that game design is a strict discipline on its own - Crutial part in making a successful game!

One of the things Im striving for in this game is for a minimalistic GUI during gameplay. I want to have as little to no GUI elements as possible.

Virtually all touch screen held-hand games offer a pause icon during gameplay. I take ideas from every game I play. One game - Escape From Monkey Island (I think) for iPhone is played in landscape mode. To pause gameplay, the user tilts the iphone so that it is oriented in portrait.

I think this is a clever idea. I run my ideas by my colleague. For this one he suggested not to do that - primarily because people like to play games in bed lying on their side. another argument was that its annoying for the user to have to switch orientation to pause or perform other actions.

Currently, I'm using the accelerometer to change camera position slightly in the 3d environment.

What are your thoughts? Can you please help me out in deciding what to do? thanks.

It drives me nuts when I am lying on the couch and I move slightly and my HTC screen flips, just let the user choose at the start and be done with it.
Cool idea about the pausing but think of when people pause games: For example they might pause it and then pocket the console - which might upset the portrait orientation, or drop the console and then unpause at a crucial moment?

(Nov 20, 2011 03:29 AM)paulidis Wrote: To pause gameplay, the user tilts the iphone so that it is oriented in portrait.

I'm considering implementing a similar feature into an ARPG I'm developing, where changing the iPhone or iPod touch to portrait orientation would open the inventory – my concern is not that the inventory might close and the game resume if the orientation of the device changes to horizontal whilst the device is in the player's pocket, but that the feature isn't obvious, and might be missed by the player...

Hey guys thanks for your input. From what you are describing, it is a bad idea to use orientation as an action as described above.

I have posted this question elsewhere and the best reply I received was about using multitouch to pause the game.
My game uses up to 2 fingers to play the game.
Thus to pause the game I require 3 fingers to touch screen at once.